Study: Since famine of mid-1990s, public health much improved in North Korea

Posted on : 2016-08-21 08:34 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
Food security no longer an emergency issue, and strides made regarding vaccine preventable diseases
Hazel Smith
Hazel Smith

Nutrition and public health among North Koreans have improved substantially since the severe famine and economic woes of the 1990s, a new study shows.

But three out of ten North Koreans were found to still suffer from malnutrition.

The findings were part of “Nutrition and Health in North Korea: What's New, What's Changed and Why It Matters,” a paper by Hazel Smith, a professor at the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, published by the Korea Development Institute in the Aug. 18 edition of its KDI Review of the North Korean Economy.

In the paper, Smith notes that the North Korean food rationing system collapsed and international aid decreased in the mid-1990s, but that the public health situation has improved since then, with a lower level of nutritional disorders than in other low-income countries.

Smith used data from the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and World Bank to analyze nutritional conditions among North Koreans during the ’10s. According to the findings, chronic and acute malnutrition fell to less than half their ’90s levels: as of 1998, 62.3% of North Koreans suffered from chronic malnutrition, while the percentage in 2012 stood at 27.9%. A large decline was also observed in acute malnutrition, from 60.6% in 1998 to 4% in 2012.

“The accumulated survey findings show a profound nutritional crisis in the 1990s,” Smith notes, adding, “From the late 1990s onwards, however, rates of chronic and acute malnutrition fell to the point where . . . a humanitarian food and health emergency no longer existed.”

Smith also reported various indicators as showing stable public health conditions, including infant and maternal mortality rates; incidence of vaccine-preventable diseases such as Japanese encephalitis, measles, and whooping cough; and death rates from malaria and tuberculosis. Life expectancy for North Koreans was calculated at 70 years in 2013 - roughly equivalent to the world average of 71 years the same year.

According to Smith, nutrition and health conditions for North Koreans were not much different from those in other low-income and developing countries.

Smith also noted that North Korea have achieved success in reducing vaccine preventable diseases and malaria.

By Noh Hyun-woong, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]

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